What We Didn't See Before

Abstract

On February 3rd and 4th last year, an impressive and diverse group of legal academics, judges, art historians, sociologists, and historians gathered at the Yale Law School to attend a symposium celebrating the publication of Judith Resnik's and Denny Curtis's book, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms. The symposium was held in multiple locations-including the Whitney Humanities Center and the Yale University Art Gallery as well as the Yale Law School - to mark its interdisciplinary framing and aspirations. The broad range of panels gave substance to this aim of approaching the visual and architectural depiction of justice through multiple channels in order to get a more comprehensive perspective. The papers addressed topics as wide-ranging as Ancient Egyptian sites of justice and color-field art. Ultimately, however - like Representing Justice itself - the papers shared a set of related concerns, demonstrating the trans-historical relevance of questions regarding figuration, space, visibility, and the profoundly resilient connection of these qualities to the deployment and execution of justice.